Beach Walk 134 – Making Up Stories

Rocketboom rumors fill the air; there are big gaps between facts and feelings!

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h3. About Today’s Show

Amanda Congdon and Andrew Baron are experiencing some public disagreements regarding their video blog, Rocketboom. Gut feelings and instinct are great tools…except when they turn out to be wrong! And especially after engaging in a course of (mis)guided action. (It can sometimes be the sneaky work of the #2 personality – see show #102 for an explanation). So here’s a catchy little concept I learned to help me step back from the brink of getting emotionally invested in situations before I know the facts:
# Making up stories
# Pretending they’re true
# Having feelings about them
# Acting on those feelings

It’s human nature to want to speculate and to have opinions. But consciousness is the opportunity to stop there, claim one’s feelings as personal and subjective, and sit with all the discomfort that accompanies them without having to pretend that the hunches and feelings are facts. You can watch a wrenching example in The End of the Affair with Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore, where he made up stories, pretended they were true, and the ending is tragic.

Into 37:18 mark of the Twit 57 Video I heard Rox’s Beachwalks’ theme clearly in the background! Rox, I think I heard your voice too. I thought that was so cool hearing that wonderful melody in the background at the vloggercon conference!

Jon – Thanks for the vote! We really appreciate the support and the help in spreading the word.

SoCalGal – You rock! Yes, TWIT was filming in the other end of the Apple Store in San Francisco while I was speaking at the podium about Beach Walks. We’re going to follow up with them.

Cali – As for Rocketboom, I’d be making up a story if I knew what was going on! Certainly a lot of people are having fun talking about it; after all, the internet some days is mostly silicon gossip.

Life changes us. It really is impossible to predict the future with accuracy. I can relate to many of the rumors I have heard, how the early excitement of something tends to put blinders on us, and when they come off, well, we see things quite differently. It’s the same in many relationships when the honeymoon is over, be it with a person, a job, a car, or even a computer.

In the meantime, I like what Alannis Morissette says:
You live you learn
You love you learn
You cry you learn
You lose you learn
You bleed you learn
You scream you learn